Dearly beloved friends:
I am approaching you, dear friends, to send you a brief explanation of a beautiful engraving attributed to Albrecht Dürer, made in 1498.
In it it is seen that, certainly, these artists, apart from being great exponents of art, they had great mystical concerns about the destiny of man in his stay on earth. Therefore, the title of this print comes to be, according to the artist…
…TEMPTATION OF THE IDLER
To get into the matter, we will begin by saying that, according to the popular proverb: “An idle mind is the devil’s workshop”. And, in fact, there is no worse evil that can plague us than forgetting ourselves, as Gnosis so well emphasizes to us. We need to be alert and not indulge in psychological or physical idleness. This is what happens to this humanity that only wants to swim in pleasure and surrender to the desires that the “I” produces from within.
The figure of the devil or the “I” wanting to introduce sinful desires in us is very clear, because it tells us openly that, while our Consciousness is asleep, we will always be receiving evil messages from the counterpart of our own BEING. That is the eternal struggle between the To Be or Not To Be of Hermetic Philosophy. In this way we can conclude that love struggles to bring us closer to the BEING, while the “counter-love” will always fight to distance us from Him…..
We can see here a middle-aged scholar dozing in front of a stove and the devil –namely: the EGO– is behind him blowing impure desires into his ear with a fireplace bellows.
On our path we have to be careful of not allowing our mind to wander, because that unhealthy habit is taken by the “I” and in this way it introduces in us, on different psychic levels, various states or desires that lead us, without a doubt, to surrender ourselves in its arms. Our humanity has fallen so low morally and animically that idleness itself leads many pilgrims of the Secret Path to let themselves be swept away by filthy desires such as masturbation, pornography, etc., etc., etc. Obviously, as long as we are animically tied to these idlenesses we will never reach the summits of the Spirit, that is to say, of the BEING.
On the other hand, in this same engraving we can observe the goddess Venus near the “sleeper”, and she offers him the apple, or the fruit of the science of good and evil. She also points to the stove –the alchemical heat in which we must take refuge in our existence– because, certainly, this apple represents sexuality. However, such sexuality can be a ladder to go up or a ladder to go down… Sex, esteemed reader, can redeem man or enslave him by tying him to the rock of animal desire.
In the state of the current human race it is easy to understand why we see Cupid ─a very sacred part of our own BEING─ in this artistic expression wanting to approach the “sleeper” using stilts, because he needs to use resources so that we do not ignore him. Cupid, distinguished reader, is the symbol of purity in love, and without that ingredient our alchemical works will be fatuous, failed, even if we want to justify ourselves before God with the excuse that WE DO NOT WANT TO FORNICATE…
In reality and in truth, Arcanum A.Z.F. is called transmutatory art because it is something that is not mechanical, sexualoid, but is the magna key to transform ourselves radically by turning the coitus into a form of prayer, as taught to us by our Patriarch, V.M. Samael Aun Weor. The latter should not be overlooked by us because that would be a great error on our part when wanting to work with the secret key.
The sphere that appears near Cupid is an allegory of our Mercury, an alchemical element that must be sublimated during the love trance.
Hoping that our words will be taken by your Consciousnesses and not by your cold intellect, I greet you all, but not without first emphasizing to you:
THE BEING IS NOT A CHIMERA, HE IS THE MOST PROFOUND REALITY IN US.
KWEN KHAN KHU
